AI, AI, AIEEEE…! 😮

Maybe that’s what the kids want right now but will it continue down that route, or will the next generation want something different. Will they want music played by musicians?

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I think these are the things that a lot of people don’t bear in mind and use Facebook and other similar platforms as if those were like old-fashioned diaries. Personality rights should have the same level of protection as moral rights related to artworks which cannot be sold or taken away. It would also be interesting to know under what terms such databases can be bought from these huge companies. Do they stipulate any conditions for using the data, or do they just set a price and sell to anyone willing to pay?

Festivals come in all sizes nowadays. For example, here in Hungary we’ve had Sziget Festival (a week-long event) for about 30 years, and as far as I know, there’s still a balance between full bands and the DJ-type things there. It also helps that there are smaller stages that cater to more niche interests. Then there are a lot of smaller festivals focusing on a few genres or having a smaller lineup.

But the most important is whether the organizers can make any profit or at least recover their investment. I guess there’s hardly any organizer / sponsor who does not care about how profitable the event is. Whether 10 years from now performers playing music on organic instruments will be more in demand than today is just impossible to tell.

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I wasn’t choosing my words carefully :thinking:
He probably said ‘paid for access’ rather than ‘bought’, but it is available to anyone who wants access.
I imagine when you do this, you have to tick the box to accept their T&Cs, which will include not using it for anything ‘bad’ and also preserving Meta’s rights to any useful product you might develop or money you might make from it.
I might just be cynical though… :wink:

Well, this sort of scene has been popular for a couple of decades. It’s what they do in clubs and resorts like Ibiza and all over the world. I don’t see any sign of it going away.

DJs have always been popular, of course, but the world changed a lot with the introduction of DJ controllers and, more recently, beat-syncing which takes a lot of the original skill out of it, although it also opens up new creative opportunities.

I actually had a tutorial on these systems a while back.

The original skill with vinyl DJing was mixing and beat-matching tracks, as well as choreographing the changes. Then when DJ controllers and digital music came in, the choreography became much easier, and when beat syncing came in, the beat-matching became a button-push away.

So, I’m not saying it’s not creative, and doesn’t require any skill; when I was given the tutorial I witnessed some very clever and creative live use of the technology which I couldn’t do (at least not without a year or two’s practice), and there’s a lot of prep work involved too.

But whilst you have to have an appreciation of music and (especially in that scene) the sort of thing the audience will enjoy, it’s basically still using other people’s music and it’s nowhere near the same sort of skill level as learning to play an instrument and making your own music from “whole cloth”.

DJs aren’t musicians, they are technicians.

But, also, there’s the opportunity to be lazy, and that’s what I saw at the festival: the middle-aged guy behind the desk did very little except run through a pre-built playlist, occasionally adjust a few faders, and trigger some samples. I could have easily done what he did.

I honestly think that most people in their audiences lack the knowledge of what these guys do and, as long as the music’s playing, a big name is on the stage, and the rest of the crowd is dancing they think they’ve been part of some amazing performance. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Yes, there will always be an audience for real, live music and there always has been. But I think there’s also an audience for image-driven poseury, and AI is probably going to become a big part of that scene.

Cheers,

Keith

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Regarding databases, based on my knowledge of the subject from a few years ago, Meta, Google and so on do not sell databases. What they sell is advertising.

As an advertiser, they give you segmented markets and you chose which ones to promote your product to. This is the same as any advertising business. What makes it different is that the internal datasets they use allow them to micro-segment you.

So, for instance, where they used to be able to say something like “middle class males, aged 30-35 living in the South of England”, they can now say “hetrosexual males, aged 30, who were born in January, are parents of children under the age of 7, own a motorcycle, have a salary between £50,000 and £55,000, live in this specific area of a town, care about environmental issues and immigration, and probably voted Lib Dem in the last election”.

What they do, or plan to do, with content and AI is unclear at this point. But as, by using Facebook, you give them permission to use your content, then I suspect they will probably not shy away from using this content to train their AI models.

At this point, Google states it does not use privately uploaded data (e.g. Google Photos) to train AI models.

Cheers,

Keith

Interesting. Philosophical question of the day: does a DJ perform music? Nothing against DJs - they certainly have talent. I see this more as a matter of expectations, the nature of talents being exhibited, that sort of thing. And certainly a live DJ is not AI (see how I brought this back to the topic? :laughing:).